The Origin of Freemasonry and Knights Templar ... - Lodge Prudentia

FREEMASONRY A\U KNIGHTS TEMPLARthe Court of the Gentiles circling the whole, a fortressof the purest marble, with its wall rising sixhundred feet from the valley; its kingly entrance,worthy of the fame of Solomon: its innumerableand stately buildings for the priests and officers ofthe temple, and above them, glittering like a successionof diadems, those alabaster porticoes andcolonnades in which the chiefs and sages of Jerusalemsat teaching the people, or walked, breathingthe air, and gazing on the grandeur of a landscapewhich swept the whole amphitheater of the mountains.I see, rising above this stupendous boundary,the court of the Jewish women, separated by its porphyrypillars and richly sculptured wall; above thisthe separated court of the men; still higher, thecourt of the priests; and highest, the crowningsplendor of all the central temple, the place of thesanctuary, and of the Holy of Holies, covered withplates of gold, its roof planted with lofty spearheadsof gold, the most precious marbles and metalseverywhere flashing back the day, till Mount Moriahstood forth to the eye of the stranger approachingJerusalem, what it had been so often describedby its bards and people, a mountain of snow studdedwith jewels."All these buildings, porticoes, columns, pinnacles,altar and temple, have perished. "Not one stoneremains upon another which has not been throwndown." The area alone remains, and the massivesubstructures for 3,000 years have been sleepingin their courses. The preservation has been dueto the ruin. Buildings so vast have been toppleddown the slopes of the Moriah, that the originaldefiles and valleys have been almost obliterated.52